This article talks about work we do when we are ready to work on clearing the influence of betrayals from our minds and emotional systems. It is about recovering our feelings of safety in the world and moving forward to create better and happier lives. Those of us who are still battling our betrayers, still clarifying our feelings of outrage or still developing our self-defensive skills may feel outraged by the very idea of forgiving. And so they should. Forgiving is something we do “at our leisure,” later when we have the time to think about restoring our emotional systems to a pre-warzone state. Ultimately we want to be positive, creative, optimistic people — without ever forgetting the lessons we learned in our histories. This article is about what we do, when we’re ready to put it all behind us. — Kathy
“Forgiveness is a dangerous passage.” This is a quote from an unknown source on the white board on my office. It’s been there for years and every time I think about cleaning it off, I think “oh not yet.” The temptation to forgive for the wrong reasons is something I don’t want to forget.
In this tenth article of this series on recovering from traumatic relationships, we will discuss the process of forgiving. It is a bridge between the grieving/letting go and the rebuilding phases.
Why bother?
A lot of people have a lot of opinions on forgiveness. Most religious or spiritual disciplines will tell us that forgiving is essential to our spiritual health. On a more mundane level, we may we aware that our friends and supporters are losing patience with our extended healing process, or may be pressuring us to get over it. On a more personal level, we may want to reenter the world without all this emotional baggage that makes us so hyper-conscious of potential threats that we have a hard time seeing or taking advantage of opportunities for good experiences.
In my mind, the only reason to ever consider forgiving is that we want to free out minds of the residue of anger that hangs on after we grieve and let go. There are other benefits we get out of forgiveness, but the first motivation has to be to improve the “quality of life” in our own minds. It’s a matter of our relationship with ourselves.
In addition, I believe there are a few prerequisites to really forgiving anything. The most important of them is that our suffering is fading. (That doesn’t mean that we’re not still dealing with repercussions of some sort, but that the level of pain has diminished to the point where it’s less important than our desire to get over it.)
The other one is that we have the stability and presence of mind to know that we can forgive without getting back into the situation that caused us all this pain in the first place. If we’re still attracted to that situation or others like it, we’re leapfrogging ahead to forgiving before we’ve done the preliminary work of getting angry at our betrayers, developing defensive skills, and facing the fact that there are things we just cannot fix or change.
What is NOT a good reason for forgiving is some sort of social expediency, because we have to deal with our betrayers or with other people who are not sympathetic or pressuring us to get over it. There are other ways to handle that situation.
Here are some of the things we may be thinking as we approach forgiving:
• These angry or frightened feelings don’t have any place in my life anymore. I want to move on.
• I’m ready to find more interests than this bitterness
• I want to clean up my emotional system so I become more positive and optimistic
• I’m starting to remember how I felt before all this happened, and I want to recover some of that joy of life.
• This just isn’t worth the energy I’ve been giving it
But to forgive, we have to overcome one major obstacle. Fear. Forgiving is actually part of overcoming fear. But we have to face it head on too.
Fear and forgiveness
The progress of healing involves us becoming more and more real about what happened and how we feel about it. In anger, we get closer to recognizing our fear, but our reaction is to throw things at it — blame, threats, vengeance, work on fixing things so it never happens again. In grieving and letting go, we accept the specific losses that we have endured. While that is good work, it also clarifies our vulnerability to random events or to specific threats in the world. We may work on accepting that vulnerability, along with our other losses, but it doesn’t change the fact that it exists.
And so now, our increasing awareness of the costs of our vulnerability raises a new issue. How do we live with the fear?
This question makes sense of all we’ve been through to process the trauma. We may have dabbled with fear in our processing. Asking ourselves “what if” this or that. What if no one ever loves me again? What if I am really too stupid to live? But we never sat down to really look it hard in the eye.
Because fear is an extremely uncomfortable emotion. In fact, if we look at all the so-called negative emotions, including shame and guilt, and do enough digging down, we find fear at the bottom of them. Other than love, it is the most fundamental emotion. And it is the antithesis of love or connectedness. We literally can’t feel love and fear at the same time. One will overtake the other.
Fear is designed to stop everything else until it is resolved. It generates the noises of anxiety and need for immediate relief, while blocking or compromising our ability to see into the future, our ability to fully recognize and enjoy what is around us, and our ability to take the normal risks involved in forward movement in our lives. It eats up our energy in a million ways and drives us toward behaviors that are about nothing but self-protection and relief from the mental noise.
This is why facing and acknowledging the fact that we are afraid can be such a powerfully transformative thing, all by itself. It is a form of clearing away all the intermediate structures of trauma-processing and getting down to the center of it in a totally authentic way. So we are no longer lying to ourselves or pretending. So that we are no longer trying to talk ourselves into irrational ideas about being stronger or safer than we are. So that we are finally clear about the fact that the universe whacked us and we don’t know when it will whack us again. It is out of our control.
This is tough stuff, the toughest of the entire grief process, and until we are ready for it, we can’t do it. Our minds won’t let us. We will slip and slide away into denial or bargaining or anger or another round of grieving and letting go, all the things that we know made us feel better than the stage before. And that is fine. Our minds have their own wisdom, and we face this issue when we have the structural underpinning in place to do this. It’s why the healing process is progressive.
But one way or another, when we come to think about forgiving, we’re going to run into this issue. How can I safely forgive if I really don’t know when I’m going to be facing the same thing again, or something worse? Or vice versa, how can I experience my fear if I’m relaxing my angry alert and protection systems by forgiving?
This trauma was nothing compared to the first one
The experience of trauma is built into our emotional histories. In a way, every trauma we experience is a replay of the primal trauma that every child experiences, the transition from life inside the womb to life out of it. It is the fundamental “expulsion from the Garden of Eden” which transfers us from a situation where we are fed, warmed, held, connected to our source to a new situation in which we are separate and dependent for our survival on things that are out of our control.
The developmental activities of the first four years are actually about the child navigating that separation to acquire certain basic intellectual perspectives and emotional skills necessary to healthy personality formation. It is our first experience of trauma processing. It occurs both on a macro level of gradual emotional acceptance of separation from the “source” and on a detail level of dealing with separate events that trigger fear, disappointment and uncertainty. If all goes well, we maintain steady bonds with our caretakers that allow us to ease into independence, self-soothing skills and the beginnings of empathy.
So we “know” what trauma means from a very early age. One way of describing trauma is that it is an unexpected breach of the rules we took for granted. Or the rules we depended on for our survival and sense of security in the world.
A whole series of emotional reactions to this breach are reasonable and normal. All the emotional stages we discuss in trauma processing, as well as others that we have not discussed in depth, such as feelings of betrayal, rejection or shame. If we go back to the nature of the first trauma, it makes sense that we would feel offended. One day our life is one thing; the next thing it’s another. What are we supposed to think? At minimum, it would be reasonable to think we are being unreasonably screwed with.
This brings us back to the primal argument. Because who, ultimately, is screwing with us? To cut a long discussion short, our big argument is not with any one persecutor in this world, not our parents, not our selfish lovers, not with the truck that hit us. It’s with God or the universe, or however we look at the overall intelligence that organizes this place. Because clearly that big intelligence has forgotten that we were previously important enough to have the suite at the center of the universe, and for reasons not made clear, we have been demoted to just one small, helpless life form in this place full things and life forms that clearly do not recognize our centrality.
Welcome to the first time we felt the fear of being vulnerable and alone. And to the basic human challenge of living with those feelings at the same time we experience love, trust, some kind of internal dignity, and the ability to risk moving forward with our lives.
There is no human being who has not been through this. And there is not one of us who doesn’t live with this challenge on a daily basis in some part of our consciousness.
It’s important to know this, because as we move forward with dealing with our own fear, we also know that some people have found ways of managing it more effectively than others.
The cost of doing business.
We have these bodies. They have their own intelligence and they want to survive. Our spirituality has its intelligence. Our intellect has its intelligence. Our emotional system has its intelligence. (See Daniel Goleman’s books on various forms of intelligence for wonderful discussions of this topic.) They are all integrated and mutually supportive, but the body is the instrument and the house where it all plays out, and one of the body’s primary vocabulary words is fear.
We cannot get away from this, but we can decide what we’re going to do about it. And that is where forgiving comes in.
There are a lot of dictionary definitions of forgiving, but for our purposes in this article, we are going to experiment with a new one. That is, making a decision about how much energy we want give to a certain source of fear in our lives.
This is not about minimizing the damage or our struggle to get over it. It is not about condoning other people’s bad behavior or the real dangers we face in the world.
Rather it is about recognizing something about ourselves. We have done all reasonable work to identify the problem, to protect ourselves in the future, to let go of what we have discovered is now gone, and to face our fear. We know what we are afraid of. Now, we consider a decision about reclassifying the issue as something we may or may not run into, something that is (to some degree) out of our control. We begin to consider whether or not we are served by continuing to let fear of this thing drain resources that could be spent on positive forward movement.
Forgiving is not the same as denial, because we make this decision with full awareness of our losses and our future risks. It involves no forgetting. We respect all the information we have gathered, in case we need it again. We respect all the feelings we have gone through, because they are part of the truth of this experience. We just decide to start withdrawing our energy, turning off that faucet, and shifting our attention to other things.
What forgiving is and isn’t
Forgiving is a decision we make and then gradually follow through, adapting that decision to our own comfort level. It is a decision we make from a position of power over the one thing we truly have power over, our own choices. Especially that supreme choice of where we place our attention.
Forgiving is something we do, knowing that we cannot totally control fear, because our bodies have their own agendas and they will generate fear if they feel it is necessary. So it also involves a deal with our bodies that we will listen to their fear, that we will not become airy-fairy pseudo-Buddhists who try to stuff their fear because they think it’s unfashionable. But we make a deal with our bodies that it’s better for the entire organism if we manage our fear, reducing our investments in fear about things we already know about, and saving our big extravaganzas of fear and anxiety for the surprises.
Forgiving is about trust at two levels. First, trust that certain bad things will happen. We can look at this statistically, if we’re inclined. A certain fraction of people we meet will be destructive emotional cripples. A certain fraction of things we buy will turn out to be unusable junk. A certain number of conversations with our relatives will include uninvited comments about our choices, our characters or our weight. Trusting that these things will happen eliminates the surprise factor and enables us to plan around these statistical likelihoods.
Second, forgiving is also a kind of trophy we get for doing the work and coming out the other side of the trauma processing. In that sense, it is about renewed trust in ourselves and in the universe. What was once a huge deal is now fully digested and just a learning experience attached to some unpleasant memories. We are whole again and on generally good terms with the big intelligence that runs everything.
In all of this, you’ve probably noticed how little I’ve talked about the perpetrator. And I’m sure you understand why. Because this is really something between the various forms of intelligence in ourselves, and it is something between us and the big intelligence that runs everything.
But still we need to get down some practicalities too. So here is what forgiveness is NOT:
• It is not condoning or acceptance of anything we find hurtful, unethical, uncaring or anything else that is bad for us. (We may find ourselves releasing negative feelings about something, when we come to understand why it happened, but we don’t have to. This is not ultimately about them. It is whether we’re ready to move on.)
•It is not about compartmentalizing or denial. We are not “stuffing” it or pretending it never happened. We’re not trying to convince ourselves that we haven’t just been through a battle or deluding ourselves that we’re more powerful than we are. We are just gradually shifting our attention away from it, as we feel comfortable doing so. We are gradually reclaiming our interest in other things.
• It is not a reason for re-involving ourselves with people or situations that hurt us. We don’t forgive so we can jump into that pool again. The only reason we would do that is if we have evolved past the point of being hurt by what hurt us before (something that doesn’t often happen) or if the person or the situation has gone through some kind of cosmic surgery and is now something else. Remember, forgiving comes AFTER we have learned self-protection in the angry phase and let go of whatever got us into this situation. If we forgive because we want to do the same thing all over again ”¦ well, you don’t need me to tell you what you’re volunteering for.
• Likewise, it is not a social cure. If we’re forgiving because we’re embarrassed about being such a bore, or because our bad feelings are alienating our families, or because we want to get along better with people who just don’t get it, we victimizing ourselves all over again. We’re giving away our authority over our own feelings, and trying to force ourselves to feel something we don’t, in order to be accepted. If it’s really important that we not communicate the full force of the outrage or grief we’re dealing with – like in a work situation or in court — we can do that. We can selectively choose where, when and how much we share, while we continue to work through our trauma privately. The ability to do this — letting some people in and keeping others out — is good practice in developing the skills of conditional trust.
• There is no reason that we have to forgive people to their faces or even let them know about it. In fact, if we’re really ready to stop wasting energy, we probably won’t. We don’t just stop bothering with them in our heads; we stop bothering with them in real life. We avoid engagement. If we have to spend energy on some kind of mop-up or dealing with continuing drama from their side, we handle it with an eye toward ending all of it, because we want to be done with it.
Finally, forgiving is not an all-or-nothing thing. Nor is it a carved-in-stone solution. We don’t say, “Oh, I’ve decided it’s not worth caring anymore about what he (or she) did to me, and now I have to not care about the new thing he (or she) is doing to me.” It doesn’t work that way. Forgiving is a way of allocating our own resources. If new circumstances require us to grab a sword and slay a few dragons before dinner, then we do it. After we come home and shower, we can decide whether we’re ready to forgive the loss of our afternoon, or if we need to spend more time processing that little irritation.
And if we absolutely feel like we must announce our decision to forgive to the sociopath, here’s a suggested forgiveness note:
I’ve decided not to give you any more attention. I’m not going to track you down, hire a hit man or sue you for theft or mental suffering. I’ve dealt with my losses by myself. But don’t confuse this with weakness. The next time you show up, it won’t be such a pleasant or profitable experience for you. I also advise you to you grow up, for your own sake. Not everyone is as forgiving as me. As Henry the XV said to a murderous friend, “I pardon you, but I also pardon whoever kills you.”
In the next article, we begin on the wonderful topic of becoming who we want to be.
Namaste. The wise emotional accountant in me salutes the wise emotional accountant in you.
Kathy
And terrorists are all about sowing fear to destabilize us. I’m nibbling at a Martha Stout book, “The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior–and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage.”
Calling sociopaths terrorists is a great insight. Thanks, jfog1. The link, in my mind, is what they do to our sense of belonging and how effectively they trigger feelings of abandonment. And what that does to our ability to get on with our lives or do anything else.
Tonight I was remembering a conversation with my ex-S, who bitterly complained that I didn’t keep my promise I would loss weight. I made the promise when we first got together and he indicated he would feel better about the relationship and me if I did this. I said, no problem. I’d always been able to lose weight when I put my mind to it.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t, because I couldn’t focus on it. I was too unhappy. I tried to tell him that he couldn’t withhold love until after I lost the weight. It didn’t work like that for me. If I didn’t feel loved, I couldn’t do it.
I was talking with my son about this tonight, and he said that it was like have no home to come home to. And it made me think about how I started shopping online during that relationship. He snarled about the money I was wasting (my money, but he had plans for what it was going to do for him). I said that when it boxes came in, it made me feel like someone cared about me.
Now, when I look at the exchanges, I can see the issue of abandonment and how scary all that criticism, withholding and scorn was. I wasn’t just abandoned and alone. I was living with someone who keep repeating and repeating that I was not good enough to be cared about. And, of course, acting like that too. My whole life got derailed into trying to change his mind and trying to make myself feel better.
Maybe a lot of things we do are insulation against feelings of abandonment.
jfog1 and all,
I would say emotional terrorist is an apt description in many instances. One of my attorneys described my ex as a terrorist – minus the qualifier “emotional”as it was not necessary. Terrorist was and is the right term for him and his bagman.
Kathleen, I have found your writing helpful as so much has been extraordinarily accurate in describing the some of the why’s of what we have been through rather than just the what’s. Many, many months -perhaps a year – back I remember an LF participant saying
“It could have happened to anyone,” and I remember thinking “No, there is more to it.” Once in a very, very rare blue moon a shark attacks a random swimmer. More often than not, animal and human predators smell the blood in the water or go for the animal who is running slower than the rest of the herd. That was certainly true in my case. I don’t think I could have expressed that sentiment, however, without it coming across as blaming the victim – which is certainly not my position.
In any case, you’ve made some extradorinarily salient points. I have your quote “There is a world of difference in what we create in going after our wants versus trying to escape what we don’t want” taped to the wall over my desk. It is slightly ironic that the very reason I swam into the waiting jaws of my ex-husband was to escape what I didn’t want — to accept responsibility for my own life. I am in the back and forth stage of anger and starting to more actively pursue my wants.
I think the first forgiveness step for me will be forgiving myself.
Somehow it seems to be harder to forgive and let go of your own adult children. because they came out of your body, and are your blood and bone. part of you says, “maybe if Id tried harder, given more, loved more, sacrificed more,they woud love me” . and one of my “things’, is that I hate injustice. I want to believe that “all is for the best in the best of possible worlds” . Didnt I take an extra job, after coming home tired from teaching all day, just so they could go to camp, or go skiiing, or learn Jazz ballet? When their Dad said “Go ask your Mum if you can go,” I knew what that meant, ie, Mum pays for it? all that running them to sleep over parties, coping with their drunken teenage friends, {and feeding them}, believing their lies and excuses? This wasnt supposed to happen.Surely my reward for 18 years of bringing them up was that they at least like me, and respect me? I know now that when my ex started drinking again, and insulting and maligning me, the girls learnt to do this to me,too. Id hope theyd take my part, but ,no, they did not.And when I was badly beaten up and left, of course, I had to leave them, then aged 17 and 19, with him.{he never ever hurt them,but Im sure he poisoned their minds about me, big time!}So, when I married David, we both tried so hard to give them love and support, and always, it was thrown back in our faces. They put David through so many “tests”, and he came out of them all with flying colours. Now though, he is heart sick of them both and doesnt want to ever see them again. he sees how they put the knife into me and turn it, how they put the boot in
and kick me below the belt. “Why do you go on putting up with them?” he asks. To be honest, I now feel very little love is left for them, I think they have destroyed most of the love I had for them. I dont want to get bitter.I suppose my biggest fear is losing touch with the 3 grandkids I still have a smallbit of contact with, although Ive seen them exactly twice in7 months. I am fighting the urge to ring my older daughter. I know that she is extremely toxic to me, and that neither of my “girls” really gives a rats arse about me! Im only a cash cow to Deb, and the other one I havent seen for over 16 years. I guess if it was a business, and youd invested time, love, money and work into it for 40 years, youd expect to makea profit , maybe a nest egg,in time. Not with bringing up ingrates. It leaves you wondering, “is this it? 40 years of devotion, and all I get is a kick in the teeth! This is not meant to happen! I feel cheated, lied to ,conned, hurt,sad, angry, all of the above. When does it all get easier to accept?
Leah, you wrote “I think the first forgiveness step for me will be forgiving myself.”
That’s an interesting process. Kind like it’s own therapy. At one point, I finally decided to take a really good look at what I was dealing with when I got involved with this guy. Not beating myself up about it, but just adding up the stresses, losses, various cliffhangers, etc.
We’ve talked, on and off, about how these relationships often start when we’re not quite whole, well, or getting over something major. But I didn’t realize how much trouble I was in when he showed up, until I did this.
I’m not going to go through the whole awful list, because I’ve written it here before. But when he said to me, “Why do you put up with this? You deserve better than this.” I think I was a goner then and there. And that was long before he got clearly aggressive about his intentions or I had any idea of getting involved with him.
When I looked at it, and all the terrible things that continued to escalate in the following months (to a degree, because he was stirring the pot), the huge personal losses I sustained, the fears I was living with and the responsibilities that were just beyond any one person’s capabilities, and there he was, acting like the calm, strong, port in a storm.
It’s just makes a lot of sense. I can blame myself for letting it get that bad, for not protecting myself or drawing boundary lines. But the whole mess came out of the fact that I was chronically unable to do that. It was a kind of sickness that came out of my family history, and one that I’d been living around all my life.
And I had to understand where that came from, and forgive myself for that too. Even though I didn’t know how to fix it, I could see it, and it’s influence through my whole life.
I never thought I was a bad person. But I did think that I was helpless, incompetent, unwise, disorganized, a failure in so many ways. All my life, people told me that I didn’t give myself credit for the wonderful person I was and all the amazing things I’d accomplished. I snarfed up the compliments, because I was desperate for them. But I’d secretly think they were crazy, because I couldn’t see anything but what was wrong with me.
This process of deliberately trying to understand why I did what I did, the same kind of caring observation and understanding that I would have extended to anyone else, was the first time I ever did that for me. And the results were pretty amazing. I not only let myself off the hook, but it made me kind of proud of myself. I made mistakes, but overall, I did pretty well. For such a screwed up, emotionally damaged person, I was a real success story.
And this process let me be screwed up and emotionally damaged. I wasn’t being mean or insulting myself. It was true. None of this stuff would have happened otherwise. It might sound like it would be depressing to admit that, but it actually wasn’t. It helped me realize that I wasn’t crazy to be spending all this time and energy trying to figure out what was wrong with me and fix it.
It’s really hard to turn off all that self-critical noise in our heads. Especially if we have unrealistic notions of how perfect we’re supposed to be. But for me, this process even put the noise in perspective. I figured it was just trying to take care me, residue from various teachers, whose rules about life I’d absorbed, because I was too screwed up and damaged to develop good ones of my own.
By the time I did this work, I’d already been through most of the angry phase, and I had a better sense of boundaries and personal rules to protect myself. I was already getting better. And it made me feel more kindly toward the insecure, submissive, desperate-for-approval person I was before. She had her reasons for being that way. But things were different now. We didn’t have to put an ad in the paper for a protector ever again.
Leah, I hope you have as good a time forgiving yourself as I did.
Namaste.
Kathy
geminigirl, you wrote “Surely my reward for 18 years of bringing them up was that they at least like me, and respect me?”
I can hear the hurt in your words. And I’m sorry you’re having to go through this.
The distance between this kind of hurt and anger is a short one. I wrote in my last post about anger helping me to develop some personal boundaries and rules about what I allow in my life. I suspect you’re going to be doing the same thing.
The history is gone. We can get mad about the unfairness of it. And I think we have to do that, to determine what we want and think we deserve right now. You deserve to be treated with the same kindness, understanding and generosity you extend to other people. Anything less is stealing good from you and not returning it. Unacceptable.
In my life, if people don’t play by those rules, they get back pretty much what they’re willing to give. Or less. I don’t care who they are. Child, family, work associates, people who think they’re my friends.
The only exception I make is if someone is clearly in emotional trouble and making a real effort to work it through. I know what that’s like, how consuming it can be, and I give them some latitude. Otherwise, people are responsible for their actions, and I judge them on how they make me feel. If they make me feel bad, they are not good for me. And I don’t put anymore energy into them.
That sounds tough, I know. But it might be the best strategy with your kids. Sometimes the greatest gift we can give other people is repercussions for their behavior. It gives them a chance to consider the costs of what they’re doing. It might not turn them around immediately. It might not turn them around at all. But it’s the best chance we have to influence them. And it’s part of taking care of ourselves.
I hope you stick around and keep writing. This is a good place to sort out what you’re going through. We’ve all been through it in some form.
Kathy
“I was talking with my son about this tonight, and he said that it was like have no home to come home to. And it made me think about how I started shopping online during that relationship. He snarled about the money I was wasting (my money, but he had plans for what it was going to do for him). I said that when it boxes came in, it made me feel like someone cared about me.”
Kathleen Hawk.
I remember too buying things for my self whenever I could with money always being so short because she refused to work or would work only part-time. How once I brought myself a polo shirt and she rushed over pick it up and threw it back down telling me it was to small. The shirt was fine and like how it fit me. Also how she wanted to pick out my clothes but they never fitted me or wasn’t the style I like. It was like she never knew anything about me. My likes or dislikes.
As for what your son stated, yes both the children and I never wanted to come home. I had too because I would have been accused of cheating on her if I was late getting home from work. But our children would spend as much time at friends then be home. Even when my oldest was home he would stay in his room all the time and play video games. I notice also how my youngest stay outside alot as well as I did in the summer months.
Yes they isolate others from us but they also isolate themselves from us. It’s draining and tiresome always walking on eggshells around them.
So true, James. There was so much that was draining and tiresome about them. No wonder we’re so tired and drained when we finally get away. Maybe all this work is just what it takes to build ourselves up again.
Kathleen,
Oh my, you’re burning that midnight oil, aren’t ya? And so is the sweet and loyal James. I’m in the pacific time zone and it’s pretty darn late over here.
Anyway, read your current post to all of us. So reasuring, so comforting, non-judgmental, and supportive. But, I ask, who is offering comfort to you, dear friend?
Are we in some abstract way helping you with any residual pain you are still dealing with? Are we in any way giving to you what you so freely and lovingly give to us? Hope so. I truly do.
Yes, you’re a brilliant writer and person with an amazing, endless capacity for compassion for so many folks on here. I don’t think I speak for myself when I write that.
But you need to get some sleep, woman!…haha.
Nite-nite all….
🙂
Kathy (RE PART 10 HOW DO WE HEAL? Forgiving)
Thanks for your wonderful article. It has given me both clarity and perspective on where I am at in the process and helped me to think about what I want to move from and toward.
For over a year I have been stuck in the pain of loss, grief and anger (the shock in the aftermath had very far reaching effects and lingered longer than I could ever had anticipated) – dwelling constantly on the damage caused by my involvement with one particular sociopath (I no longer refer to him as ‘my’ as I never really KNEW him). Perhaps the hardest part has been the self-loathing and guilt for how I compromised all my other relationships in the confusion and emotional chaos caused by this sick sick person. It has taken me a long time to get to this point and the realisation that I had indeed ‘turned a corner’ was when I reflected that my life was rather mundane at times – things and people around me just ‘jogging along’ – but QUITE HAPPILY. What seemed like a negative frame of mind made me realise that what I was actually experiencing was consistency and peace in my life. The fact that it seemed ‘mundane’ made me realise that it just meant that I had an opportunity to create more positive activity in my daily routine. I hadn’t realised that my fear was preventing me from engaging in many of the activities I had enjoyed prior to the nightmare of being with someone who had me in ‘mental handcuffs’ – immobilising me, isolating and introvertiing me. I have thought long and hard about how I could have allowed that to happen – it made me feel weak, spineless and lacking in character. I now realise that many people use emotional manipulation of others in response to their own fears (not just sociopaths) and, distateful though it is, I am glad I am now armed with this knowledge. My initial reactions to this were of anger but gradually, little by little, I am beginning to realise it is very valuable to be able to identify the first signs of this type of behaviour in a person – stay calm but make informed choices based on the reality of what’s going on rather than the illusion that is being presented in the guise of ‘it’s only because I love/care about you so much’ (other contributors will, no doubt, be familiar with this phrase).
I know, like many people on this blog page, I still have a long way to go but it is truly wonderful – even with the financial mess a long way from being cleaned up – to feel that I am armed with some tools for ‘living’ again – I now feel ready to start forgiving myself and enjoying the truly genuine and loving people around me – good wishes to all of you who have been in the black hole of misery created by these half-formed, broken people – they are truly to be pitied, if they fleetingly cross one’s mind, as they will never know the true meaning of love, integrity, happiness, living well and harmony with others. ESCAPEE
Dear Geminigirl,
Quote: “When does it get easier to accept?”
It took me 25 years after the “ingratitude” started to come to the conclusion that just like these women/men here who thought they knew their lover/husband/wife/friend I had only “Tjhought” I knew the man my sweet little boy became.
Yea, I felt cheated=—cheated out of all the dreams I had for him (obviously he did not share them) I felt cheated out of the relationship I had planned to have with my adult son, obviously, the ONLY relationship he wanted from me was to be an “orphan”—LOL
Yep, it hurts—but geminigirl, you were a good mother. good or bad mothering doesn’t make that much difference if they are DETERMINED to become psychopaths, and we all know how psychopaths treat others.
Back when I first say my kid was “going down fool’s hill” as my sterp father called it, I thought there was some point along the way he would see the lilght and turn around…..NOPE! Didn’t happen, itsn’t going to happen now. He is what he is and he is not going to change and I can’t change him, AND it is NOT MY “FAULT” that he became what he became. I wasn’t a perfect parent, but his brother didn’t make the same choices he did, ,and is not in prison for cold blooded pre-planned bloody murder.
The boy my son was is DEAD to me, the man he IS is a stranger, just another convict in a prison in Texas. I don’t know this man, I don’t want to know this man, I grieved for my dead child, but because this man is using his organs doesn’t mean this man is my son, I let my lost little boy “go” and I grieved fo rhis loss, but he is GONE and that MAN is a stranger.
Maybe looking at the adult WOMAN not as your daughter but as simply the rrecipient of an “organ transplant” from your little girl who is GONE might help you. And, in truth, they are NOT the little children we loved, they are malicious and evil incarnate, but they are NOT our children. (hugs)))